Environmental Studies Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/1794/2675

Browse

Now showing 1 - 20 of 89

Embargo
Vulnerability in the Avalanche Capital: The Human Dimensions of Avalanche and Landslide Hazard in Juneau, Alaska
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Provant, Zachary; Carey, Mark
In the United States, climate disasters kill thousands of people and cost billions of dollars each year. In 2023, the United States experienced 28 environmental disasters that cost more than one billion dollars each—the most ever in a single year—highlighting the accelerating convergence of climate change and hazard zone development. The cryosphere faces some of the most amplified climatic changes, yet snow hazards continue to receive little attention from social scientists. This dissertation therefore examines snow hazards from avalanches and landslides in downtown Juneau, Alaska, one of the most exposed cities in the country. Using mixed qualitative methods—including interviews, participant observation, document and media analysis, and geospatial analysis—this dissertation draws on Juneau as a case study to advance the existing research on vulnerability in hazard zones. To contribute to vulnerability and unnatural disasters literature, chapters two through four examine the actors, sites, and moments that produce vulnerability and offer three key findings. Chapter 2, “Hazard Zone Conflicts in the Avalanche Capital,” argues that political, economic, and legal conflicts create windows of opportunity for powerful actors to influence the trajectory of hazard management. Chapter 3, “Housing Justice in a Hazard Zone,” argues that not only inequitable city planning and development initiatives create unnatural disasters, but also the process of hazard mitigation itself. Hazard mitigation strategies, such as the 2018-2023 hazard zone mapping project, disproportionately distribute new risks throughout the community. Chapter 4, “Shifting Climate Hazards and the Inertia of Disasters,” argues that the momentum of powerful societal forces, such as longstanding avalanche research programs and public unfamiliarity with landslides, obstructs Juneau’s ability to adapt to climate change and the increasing landslide hazard. While the details in each chapter are contextual and place-based, the broader findings offered in this dissertation are relevant for hazard zones around the world. This dissertation recommends: 1) scientists proactively integrate research on local social dynamics into their hazard and risk studies; and 2) decision-makers prioritize greater equity in the hazard mitigation and climate adaptation process. This dissertation includes previously published coauthored material.
Open Access
Ecological Intensification of Oregon Hazelnut Orchards: Restoring Native Plant Communities in Shared Ecosystems
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Lane-Massee, Marissa; Hallett, Lauren
The rapidly expanding Oregon hazelnut industry offers a unique opportunity for restoring ecosystem services to private lands that were historically oak-prairie dominated habitats. With typical orchard management consisting of bare-soil orchard floors, ecological intensification through the use of native conservation cover may directly benefit farmers and their operations, saving time and money spent on land management. With the hazelnut industry currently investing resources into young orchards, soil management with cover crops has become a contentious point of research. Looking towards the future, understanding how cover crops can be tailored towards an expanding and aging Oregon hazelnut industry is imperative. Here, I study the feasibility of large-scale native conservation cover implementation in a mature orchard, with measurements of compatibility to orchard management practices and desirable ecosystem services that farmers can directly utilize. My results show that native conservation cover can successfully suppress orchard weeds, align with important pest management timeframes, facilitate hazelnut pickup during wet harvest years, reduce chemical and mechanical inputs, and while not having a significant effect on soil moisture, significantly reducing soil temperature during summer months. This study demonstrates the feasibility and compatibility for native conservation cover to be used in commercial hazelnut systems, and the capacity at which native conservation cover directly benefits the farmer and agroecosystem alike.
Open Access
Forward-looking approaches to rangeland restoration in a variable world
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Batas, Lina; Hallett, Lauren
Ecological restoration is a powerful tool for repairing degraded ecosystems and promoting biodiversity and ecosystem functions. As global change drivers shift baseline conditions, forward-looking restoration approaches aim to establish resilient communities that can buffer and adapt to existing and future conditions. Genetic diversity and functional trait diversity of seeds are important considerations when restoring ecosystems that are resilient to multiple stressors. Restoration outcomes vary depending on the environmental conditions and interactions with neighboring species, both of which can change over time. Incorporating the role of variability in restoration frameworks is important to guide and assess efforts in a variable and changing world.Here, I examine forward-looking approaches to restoration on semi-arid rangelands of the western United States. Specifically, I focused on rangelands in the Great Basin and California. Biodiversity and ecosystem functions of these rangelands are threatened by the interacting effects of wildfires, invasive annual grasses, and drought. Each of the chapters presented in my dissertation ask a question that seeks to improve rangeland restoration in an era of climate change. In Chapter II, I conduct a field survey after a mega-fire and examine how the current practice of post-seeding with native seeds affects the genetic diversity of wildland populations. In Chapter III, I test how an emerging seed sourcing strategy called climate-adjusted provenancing – supplementing local provenance with nonlocal provenances biased towards future climatic conditions – improves seedling establishment under drought. In Chapter IV, I consider how intraspecific variability in trait plasticity influence predictability of seedling performance under water stress and cheatgrass competition. In Chapter V, I explore the above- and belowground relationships between community-level functional diversity and biomass production across variable rainfall conditions. In Chapter VI, I apply the concepts from modern coexistence theory to assess restoration trajectories and guide restoration actions. Throughout, I collaborate with scientists from multiple disciplines and use wide ranging methods and concepts to provide practical solutions to contemporary restoration challenges. This dissertation includes previously published co-authored material.
Open Access
AN ACCUMULATION OF CATASTROPHE: A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF WILDFIRE IN THE WESTERN UNITED STATES
(University of Oregon, 2024-03-25) Dockstader, Sue; Foster, John
This dissertation is an environmental sociological study of wildland fire in what is now the western United States. It examines wildfire management from roughly the 1900s to the present time employing a Marxist historical materialist analysis. The title of this work reflects the accumulated social and environmental effects of capitalism and the interconnected catastrophes of its development. Historically, Indigenous cultural burning shaped western landscapes that provided for human and nonhuman needs, while remaining resilient to environmental disturbances. Capitalist expansion effected a rift in the relationship between humans and fire through dispossession of Native Americans, commodity production, and fire exclusion. This metabolic rift is beset by economic crises, and human displacement enabled the U.S. to mobilize large groups of precarious workers to fight fires which it continues to do today. Rapid and complete fire elimination has left a legacy of unhealthy forests and grasslands that occasionally provide fuel for wildfires that threaten people, structures, and natural resources requiring suppression. This burn-fight-burn cycle, or wildfire paradox, exemplifies what Engels called the “revenge of nature” in which the supposed subjugation of nature exposes humans to unimagined vulnerability. Modern wildfire science evolved in relation to U.S. imperialist military and economic domination that increased global economic activity among Global North countries in the aftermath of World War II. This Great Acceleration increased carbon dioxide emissions responsible for climate change that, in turn has exacerbated wildfire activity as well as propelling human settlement in and near uninhabited, wild areas that spark fires. In recent decades an alliance of polluting industries, utilities, forest owners, and the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector, have been profiting from the continued CO2 emissions that drive wildfires using carbon trading, third party liability arrangements and novel insurance products with disastrous results. This dissertation concludes with a discussion of possible avenues for changing the relationship between humans and wildland fire to avert further catastrophe.
Embargo
Managing Life's Future: Species Essentialism and Evolutionary Normativity in Conservation Policy, Practice, and Imaginaries
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-10) Maggiulli, Katrina; Alaimo, Stacy
Folk essentialist and normative understandings of species are not only prevalent in popular layperson communities, but also end up undergirding United States conservation policy and practice due to the simplistic clarity they afford the notoriously knotty scientific debate of “the Species Problem” that recognizes over 26 in-use species definitions. Popular views of species typically see species as static and clearly bounded entities, a view reinforced by the need for species clarity in the legal frameworks of powerful conservation policy such as the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA). These static views are thus taken up into conservation policy and practice and species in the field are managed as such—a circumstance that not only fails to protect species as the constantly evolving entities they are, but also manages organismal agency by policing the boundaries between species and thereby creating materially specific species realities motivated by human-derived frameworks. This dissertation tracks normative views on species in conservation policy (e.g., the ESA) and practice, through contemporary debates over the place of biotechnology in threatened and endangered species conservation, and into speculative future imaginaries. It draws on a wide range of primary materials including U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and non-governmental organization management plans; policy documents; scientist op-eds and studies; and speculative bestiaries for its interpretive and historical analysis of the development, integration, and actualization of normative, essentialist species concepts in U.S. conservation. I argue that conservation is a fundamentally creative practice of worldmaking that brings materially specific species futures into being while preventing others. Attentiveness to who nonhuman animals and plants themselves identify as kin (through processes of mating and reproduction), rather than merely using human-structured frameworks of species-being is therefore paramount to account for nonhuman agency in conservation practice. Such attention will force us to rethink the place of hybrid individuals and processual, evolutionary models in our conservation practice. Deploying a further speculative method in the form of entries into a Speculative Field Notes on the Pacific Northwest, this project asks: What unexpected evolutionary possibilities and species agency might emerge at the margins, in spite of “command and control” conservation methods?
Embargo
Unsettled Ecologies: Alienated Species, Indigenous Restoration, and U.S. Empire in a Time of Climate Chaos
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-10) Fink, Lisa; Wald, Sarah
This dissertation traces environmental thinking about invasive species from Western-colonial, diasporic settlers of color, and Indigenous perspectives within U.S. settler colonialism. Considering environmental discourses of species invasion through the lens of settler colonialism helps us better understand how ideas about race, Indigeneity, and nature continue to shape invasion biology’s language and practices—which erase Indigeneity and contribute to the marginalization of those constructed as “alien” within dominant U.S. racial discourse. Synthesizing Indigenous Studies, Asian American Studies, and environmental humanities, I argue that dominant invasive species discourses and management practices contribute to a broader settler colonial project of maintaining control over Indigenous lands and waters. I emphasize that such species’ ecological, economic, and social impact directly results from colonialism and capitalism, which prompts a necessary shift in language from “invasive species” to alienated species, an alternative term I propose to signal this interconnection. Reading various media such as U.S. Congressional proceedings, popular science, YouTube videos, social media, and reality TV shows like Duck Dynasty, I demonstrate how dominant discourses of species invasion rely on racial logics of purity and colonial logics of possession to construct such species as alien Others against which nativity and whiteness are defined. Close readings of contemporary literature emerging from communities constructed as “alien,” such as Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998) and Marwa Helal’s Invasive Species (2019), reveal that, far from being value-neutral, these mainstream discourses and practices have as much to do with colonialism and race as they do with biology. As a counterpoint, I investigate differences between Indigenous and settler-colonial understandings of species’ migration, emphasizing relationships between Indigenous and so-called “alien” communities under settler colonialism. Focusing on approaches by the Anishinaabeg and CHamoru, I highlight how Indigenous ecologies, ecological knowledge, and practices focus on the possibilities of emerging relations with alienated species and envision radical alternatives for imagining place, migration, and belonging. I identify these responses in interview data from fieldwork conducted with nine Anishinaabe nations and in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s (Potawatomi) Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) and Craig Santos Perez’s (CHamoru) from unincorporated territory [hacha] (2008).
Embargo
Futuremaking in a Disaster Zone: Everyday Climate Change Adaptation amongst Quechua Women in the Peruvian Cordillera Blanca
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-10) Moulton, Holly; Carey, Mark
Indigenous women in Peru are often labeled “triply vulnerable” to climate change due to race, gender, and economic marginalization. Despite Peru’s focus on gender, Indigeneity, and intersectionality in national adaptation planning, this blanket label of women’s vulnerability persists in local ‘disaster zones’ like the Andes, where melting glaciers create flooding and water scarcity hazards. This narrative of vulnerability erases Indigenous women’s lived experiences and adaptions, positioning them as a “harmed and damaged” group bracing for climate disaster. As a result, most adaptation studies and policies in glaciated regions focus first on climate change and second on daily life, and only rarely on the intersections of gender, race, and class that shape adaptation futures. This dissertation draws on interviews, document analysis, archival research, and participant observation to understand how Indigenous women are adapting to climate change in the Peruvian Cordillera Blanca, and how their diverse experiences are reflected by Indigenous women’s organizations and the Peruvian state in national level adaptation planning. I draw on a case study in the Cordillera Blanca mountain range—as well as an analysis of gender and Indigeneity in national adaptation planning—to show how Indigenous women’s adaptation experiences and demands play out across scales. I conducted fieldwork over the course of five cumulative months between 2017-2019, and I collaborated with a local researcher in the Cordillera Blanca to conduct in-depth interviews between 2020-2022. The dissertation includes three findings: 1) Quechua women in the Cordillera Blanca engage in futuremaking, a framework that centers a fuller understanding of the everyday needs and desires of women and the communities they support, as opposed to the singular focus on interventions to reduce flood risk; 2) Indigenous women leaders in Peru draw on their territorial claims and resistance to extractive activities to re-make adaptation planning into a space that centers Indigenous sovereignty, and; 3) Quechua women’s labor in home gardens underpins community adaptations, upending regional templates of adaptation as infrastructure and hazard reduction. Ultimately, this research shows how women's futuremaking practices, adaptation labor, and resistance to territorial dispossession identify different risks and adaptation futures compared to most hazard-focused researchers and policymakers.
Embargo
Land Acts: Land's Agency in American Literature, Law, and History from the Colonial Period to Removal
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-10) Keeler, Kyle; LeMenager, Stephanie
This dissertation examines land’s agency and relationships to land in the places now known as the United States as these relationships appear in literature and law from early colonization to the removal period. Land Acts is a project of archival recovery and an intervention into American legal imaginaries that have wreaked havoc on ecological systems. I consider texts by John Arthur Gibson and Canassatego (Haudenosaunee), Uncas, Samson Occom, and Joseph Johnson (Mohegan), and Elias Boudinot, Nancy Ward, and John Ross (Cherokee) in contrast to iconic settler legal decisions regarding land, including the Mason Land Case (c. 17th Century), federal Indian Removal Policy (c. 1820s-50s), and contemporary cases such as Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta (2022). Drawing from a framework of key Indigenous concepts such as Glen Coulthard’s (Yellowknives Dene) “grounded normativity,” Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s (Anishinaabe) “place-based relationality,” Vanessa Watts’ (Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee) “Indigenous place-thought,” and Kyle Powys Whyte’s (Citizen Potawatomi) “systems of responsibility,” I find that Native authors in my primary texts elucidate land’s role as an historical actor, influencer of cultural production, and ally in resistance. As Indigenous authors and land co-produce literature, history, and legislation, both suggest ecologically sound legal policy in contrast to settler property law, which marks land as a commodity at worst or a tool for communication with a higher power at best. Through agential relationship with land, Native authors offer contexts for resisting settler violence as well as situating land’s needs (and a responsibility to land) at the center of social order. I argue that literature must be reperiodized around legislation centering on land, as Native writers preempt, detail, and respond to such legislation in partnership with land. Once land is understood to influence cultural production, it may be (re)animated in our present moment, and it must be viewed as an agential relation in contemporary resistance to ecologically destructive policy and legislation. As an intervention in American and Indigenous Studies, I am hopeful that Land Acts calls attention to Native ties to land across American history, reminding readers that Native sovereignties are non-negotiable through a studied awareness of the relationships that Native peoples maintain with land.
Open Access
PALEOTEMPERATURE, VEGETATION CHANGE, FIRE HISTORY, AND LAKE PRODUCTIVITY FOR THE LAST 14,500 YEARS AT GOLD LAKE, PACIFIC NORTHWEST, USA
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Baig, Jamila; Gavin, Daniel
The postglacial history of vegetation, wildfire, and climate in the Cascade Range (Oregon) is only partly understood. This study uses high-resolution analysis from a 13-meter, 14,500-year sediment core from Gold Lake to reconstruct forest vegetation, fire, and climate using four traditional palaeoecological methods: pollen, charcoal, organic matter variables, and a biological variable chironomid (midges living in the lake). As the response of these proxies differs, this multiproxy approach is vital to have a complete picture of past environments. The occurrence of three tephra layers, including a 78-cm air fall Mazama tephra and highly laminated segments, allows us to study tephra impacts at a fine temporal resolution. This study is the first attempt in Oregon to reconstruct paleotemperature using chironomids.The high-resolution macroscopic charcoal and pollen analysis reveals that there is minimal variation in pollen spectra during the Late Glacial and Younger Dryas periods. However, the early Holocene shows a sudden increase in Pseudotsuga, indicating warmer conditions, while the late Holocene shows an increase in Tsuga heterophylla and Tsuga mertensiana, suggesting the onset of moist conditions. The charcoal data indicate periods of large fire peaks during the Late Glacial, pre-, and post-Mazama eruption and since 4,000 years ago. Surprisingly, low fire activity is observed during the early Holocene, which contradicts expectations based on regional evidence of warmer and drier summers. The deposition of the Mazama tephra resulted in changes to the non-arboreal pollen composition, while arboreal taxa were minimally affected. The paleotemperature reconstruction reveals variations in the taxon richness of chironomids. The reconstructed midge-based mean July air temperature (MJAT) at Gold Lake ranged between 9.4 and 13.2°C, with the Late Glacial period being 2-3°C colder than present. The transition into the early Holocene indicates a temperature increase with MJAT varying between 10.7°C and 13.1°C. The analysis of organic geochemistry reveals variability in δ13Corg and δ15N, reflecting changes in aquatic productivity. The base of the core following deglaciation shows low terrestrial input and high aquatic productivity, while the Holocene warming period is associated with decreased δ15N and increased input from cyanobacteria. The thick Mazama tephra enhances diatom production and subsequent fluctuations in mass accumulation rate. The late Holocene exhibits high aquatic productivity, potentially influenced by increased forest fires and nutrient runoff. This multiproxy approach significantly contributes to understanding climate change and ecosystem dynamics in the Cascade Range of Oregon based on high-resolution analysis of sediment records from Gold Lake. This dissertation is organized into three main chapters that will be published as separate articles/already published by the dissertation defense time.
Open Access
Soil Nutrient Additions Shift Orthopteran Herbivory and Invertebrate Community Composition
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-26) Altmire, Gabriella; Hallett, Lauren
Anthropogenic alterations to global pools of nitrogen and phosphorus are driving declines in plant diversity across grasslands. As such, concern over biodiversity loss has precipitated a host of studies investigating how vertebrate herbivores affect the functioning of these nutrient enriched plant communities. However, there remains a dearth of empirical work cataloging (1) how invertebrate herbivores affect these communities, and (2) how invertebrate trophic structure responds to such communities. Here, I asked how long-term nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) enrichment affects Orthopteran herbivory and invertebrate community composition in a mountain meadow. First, I measured herbivory of two focal species—Bromus carinatus, a grass, and Lupinus latifolius, a legume—belonging to functional groups I hypothesized would increase and decrease, respectively, with nutrient enrichment. Then, I investigated whether nutrient induced changes in plant functional groups and habitat volume would change invertebrate trophic group abundances, including pollen/nectar-feeding herbivores, leaf-chewing herbivores, and parasitoids. I found that with both N and P additions, herbivory of B. carinatus increased, while herbivory of L. latifolius decreased, but only with N addition. Despite N quite drastically altering the plant community, it only changed one invertebrate trophic group surveyed, increasing nectar/pollen-feeding herbivore abundance. By increasing grass abundance, P increased both (non-Orthopteran) leaf-chewing herbivore and parasitoid abundances. These findings suggest that (1) in systems with an abundant grasshopper community, plant community response(s) to soil nutrient enrichment is likely influenced by its herbivory, and (2) in diverse, natural systems, invertebrate community response to global change is complex because trophic groups may respond differently to plant community change.
Open Access
On Western Juniper Climate Relations
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-26) Reis, Schyler; Silva, Lucas
Western juniper woodlands are highly sensitive to climate in terms of tree-ring growth, seedling establishment and range distribution. Understanding the dynamics of western juniper woodlands to changes in precipitation, temperature, and atmospheric CO2 levels is an important component in the development of the next generation of ecological models, natural resource policies, and land management actions. Increased atmospheric CO2 has been hypothesized to reduce the impact of drought through an increase in intrinsic water use efficiency. However, whether this increase in drought tolerance will mitigate predicted increases in temperature and decreases in precipitation in poorly understood. Additionally, potential geospatial patterns of changes in sensitivity to climate, and differential responses of competing plant species warrants further investigation.Recent projection models focused on the rangelands of Oregon retain a high level of uncertainty regarding the dynamics of western juniper woodlands. My dissertation reduces this uncertainty by quantifying the impacts of increased atmospheric CO2 on the sensitivity of western juniper tree-ring growth to precipitation and temperature. In Chapter II, I applied a method for quantifying changes in tree-ring sensitivity to climate variables under changing CO2 values to thirteen previous dendrochronological studies. Idiscovered that climate sensitivity dynamics of western juniper woodlands follow a pattern of increasing baseline sensitivity, and greater recent reductions in sensitivity, as site aridity increase across climate-space. Additionally, I developed a permutation model to assess the coverage of site locations across western juniper climate-space. In Chapter III, I applied the same analytical method on western juniper and ponderosa pine trees I sampled in the Chewaucan river basin. I discovered that western juniper are more sensitive to precipitation, and ponderosa pine are more sensitive to temperature. Also, including a long-term precipitation variable in tree-ring growth models improved model fit. In Chapter IV, I compared sensitivity trends from Chapter II with trends from bootstrapped moving window correlation and response functions and found strong agreement between model types. Throughout these chapters I infer how changes in climates sensitivity of western juniper trees may impact the future range and distribution of western juniper woodlands along with the potential impacts on policy and land management actions.
Open Access
Stories We Tell, Stories We Eat: Mexican Foodways, Cultural Identity, and Ideological Struggle in Netflix’s Taco Chronicles
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-26) Sanchez, Bela; Wooten, Stephen
Food is a biological necessity imbued with numerous social, cultural, and economic implications for identity production and everyday meaning-making. Food television is a unique medium for the meanings of food and foodways to be illustrated and communicated. This research analyzes the food docuseries Taco Chronicles as a popular media text that reflects cultural and national identities and ideological struggle in Mexico. Specific themes which emerged include the interplay of indigeneity, Europeanness, and mestizaje as racialized identities; food as a way to uphold or challenge heteronormative gender roles and expectations; and shared cultural identity and the everyday practices of the nation as conveyed through food. This thesis interrogates the multiple sociocultural hierarchies at stake in Taco Chronicles and argues that the show (re)creates the boundaries of shared identity through its visual and discursive elements.
Open Access
Multispecies Memoir: Self, Genre, and Species Justice in Contemporary Culture
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Otjen, Nathaniel; LeMenager, Stephanie
Liberal humanism articulates an individual, rational, autonomous, universal, and singularly human subject that possesses various rights and freedoms. Although the imagined subject at the heart of liberal humanist philosophy has improved the material and social conditions of many, this dissertation diagnoses the liberal subject and the feelings and experiences of isolation it produces as the root cause of multiple social and environmental injustices. Multispecies Memoir reimagines three interconnected projects that have played central roles in the production of the liberal human subject and human apartness: narrative, selfhood, and justice. Pursuing modes of living premised upon reciprocal relationships with nonhumans, not the logics of isolation and domination perpetuated by liberal humanism, I study a subgenre of life writing that I call “multispecies memoir.” Developing in the late twentieth century, these global narratives theorize selfhood, and literature more broadly, as emerging through relationships with multiple species. I look to the “entangled self” described by multispecies memoirs as fashioning an alternate subject, one that disrupts and dislodges the liberal human figure. In the process, I reimagine justice around an entangled, multispecies self. The modes of multispecies justice developed in this project shift the focus of justice away from serving an isolated, rights-bearing individual to instead prioritizing the maintenance of reciprocal relationships and the elimination of violence that threatens these relationships. Multispecies Memoir makes three primary interventions in the environmental humanities: 1) it articulates selves as emerging through multispecies relations; 2) it asserts that justice for marginalized peoples and justice for other species must be pursued together via entangled subjects; 3) it theorizes literature as a multispecies contact zone co-authored and populated by nonhumans. The dissertation is organized around two sections, each of which proposes modes of coexistence that disrupt liberal humanism and its logics of isolation. The first section, “Entangled Knowledges and Practices,” studies how contemporary science and care have opened the boundaries of the self to other beings. The second section, “Multispecies Violence and Resistance,” examines how violence impacts humans, nonhumans, and their relationships with each other, and it considers how humans and nonhumans have come together to resist such violence.
Open Access
Understanding How Changes in Disturbance Regimes and Long-Term Climate Shape Ecosystem and Landscape Structure and Function
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Wright, Jamie; Silva, Lucas
Long-term and anthropic climatic change intersecting with disturbances alters ecosystem structure and function across spatiotemporal scales. Quantifying ecosystem responses can be convoluted, therefore utilizing multiproxy approaches clarifies consequent responses beyond correlations. Throughout the Holocene, climate continuously changed, contributing to increasing drought duration in some regions, such as the Pacific Northwest (PNW) (early Holocene) of the United States (also late Holocene wetting), and more intense precipitation in others, like South America (mid to late Holocene). A dominant dictating force in terrestrial system compositions is climate (e.g., temperature and precipitation), which is observed through reoccurring biotic patterns existing across the globe (i.e., ‘biomes’). Some biome distribution schematics designate biomes based on a shifting relationship between temperature and precipitation in which biomes can transition into others consequently mirroring climatic change. However, shifts in biomes are instigated on a lower level, such as the ecosystem scale where ecosystems dynamically respond to internal and exogenous forces. Consequently, ecosystems are perpetually fluctuating where multiple regimes can coexist under the same environmental conditions in which feedbacks, perturbations, and regime resiliency can either reinforce ecosystem statuses or contribute to shifts. My dissertation aims to elucidate ecosystem responses to climatic and disturbance changes specifically looking through a lens of carbon sequestration and stability. Understanding the persistence of carbon within an ecosystem is more prudent than ever given our current climate crisis. My research spans different hemispheres and time periods, where I utilize different approaches in each chapter to quantify ecosystem responses from varying angles. In Chapter II, I quantify how forest and savanna ecosystems have changed over the late Holocene across a large ecoregion (i.e., Brazil’s Cerrado) using stable and radiocarbon isotopes within the soil. In Chapter III, I transition to a landscape scale in the PNW where I investigate how fire in tandem with post-fire management influence soil carbon stability and soil fungal community composition. Chapter IV encompasses the ecosystem level within the PNW, where I use a single sediment core and a multiproxy approach to reconstruct biogeochemical shifts throughout the Holocene in response to climatic and disturbance changes. My dissertation possesses previously published and unpublished coauthored research.
Open Access
Ikpíkyav (To Fix Again): Drawing From Karuk World Renewal To Contest Settler Discourses Of Vulnerability
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Vinyeta, Kirsten; Norgaard, Kari
The Klamath River Basin of Northern California has historically been replete with fire-adapted ecosystems and Indigenous communities. For the Karuk Tribe, fire has been an indispensable tool for both spiritual practice and ecological stewardship. Over the last century, the Tribe’s ability to burn has been severely repressed by the United States Forest Service occupation of Karuk Ancestral Territory. Only in recent decades has the federal agency come around to recognize the ecological value of fire, subsequently seeking partnerships with the very Indigenous communities it once delegitimized. This dissertation concerns itself with a critical examination of scientific and political discourses of Indigenous vulnerability. My findings reveal how the settler state employs settler colonial and racist logics to justify ongoing Indigenous dispossession. The irony is, of course, that climate change and the contemporary wildfire crisis have been produced by settler colonialism. This dissertation therefore also contests settler discourses of vulnerability by illustrating the complexity, relationality, and resilience that characterizes Karuk World Renewal, the epistemological and spiritual backbone of Karuk land management. In doing so, I make the case for the value of visual methods, and specifically illustration, in serving the nascent field of Indigenous environmental sociology.
Open Access
Grassland Restoration in Heterogeneous, Changing, and Human Dominated Systems
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Brambila, Alejandro; Hallett, Lauren
Ecological restoration is a powerful tool to promote biodiversity and ecosystem function. Understanding underlying system variability and directional change can help predict outcomes of restoration interventions. Spatial or temporal availability of resources, for example, can lead to a similarly applied intervention having different outcomes. Similarly, as climate change shifts underlying competitive dynamics management strategies that worked in the past may no longer work. Human influence has played a major role in determining patterns of heterogeneity and novelty across systems, and human-dominated systems can provide opportunities for extending restoration impacts beyond wildlands. Here, I examine how environmental variation, change, legacy and land use influence restoration outcomes in western U.S. grasslands. Specifically, I focus on semi-arid and Mediterranean grasslands of California, Oregon and Washington. These grasslands are invaded by introduced annual grasses, which threaten to displace native species and, especially in the perennial dominated north, transform ecosystem state and function. Each of the chapters presented in my dissertation ask a question that seeks to contextualize and improve grassland restoration across a variable landscape. In Chapter II, I examine how grazing herbivory enhances or dampens the effect of environmental variation on resource availability at different scales using data from a long-term cattle-herbivory exclusion study. In Chapter III, I ask how communities with variable starting conditions established by climate and management legacies respond to restoration burning across regional climate gradient. In Chapter IV, I consider how warming impacts competitive outcomes between species representative of two potentially dominant functional groups. Finally, in Chapter V, I test the feasibility of expanding restoration into a novel agricultural context potentially compatible with native grassland vegetation. Throughout, I consider what each of these outcomes mean in a management context, and how they can be applied more broadly to improve restoration success. This dissertation includes previously published co-authored material.
Open Access
Restoring What? And for Whom? Listening to Karuk Ecocultural Revitalization Practitioners and Uncovering Settler Logics in Ecological Restoration.
(University of Oregon, 2022-05-10) Worl, Sara; Norgaard, Kari
What does it mean to restore a landscape degraded by settler colonialism? How might a well intentionedprocess like ecological restoration end up causing harm from underlying settler colonial logics? This thesis explores these questions through interviews with nine Karuk ecocultural practitioners, and offers pathways forward for collaborative ecological restoration processes that support Indigenous ecocultural revitalization efforts and stand-up to destructive settler logics.
Open Access
Instigating Communities of Solidarity: An Exploration of Participatory, Informal, Temporary Urbanisms
(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Meier, Briana; Toadvine, Ted
This dissertationexamines the potential for participatory, informal urbanisms to buildcollaborative relations across ontological, cultural, and political difference. This research contributes to thefield of urban, environmental studies by emphasizing four often underdevelopedaspects of participatory urbanisms. First, I examine the unique affordancesoffered by temporary, informal urban interventions. Second, I focus on the roleof the material artifacts and places of participatory urbanisms in thedevelopment of communities of solidarity. Third, the project addresses theongoing colonial legacy of North American and European cities by foregroundingalternative conceptions of place and emphasizing how the development of NorthAmerican and European cities is inherently tied to colonization anddispossession. Fourth, this project forms relays between theory and practice toexcavate the typically unexamined ontologies that inform urban design,building, and dwelling. I analyze recentscholarship and social activism at the intersection of North American,Indigenous philosophies of and Euro-Western, posthumanist, new materialisttheory. I argue that these emerging fields neglect community participation inthe built environment, despite their emphases on social justice, relationality,place, and material conditions. I test my hypothesis that informal, urbanpractices are critical spaces of social theory production through two casestudies. First, “The Kitchen on the Run” is a project in Germany that supportsrefugee and local resident community-building through group cooking events heldoutdoors in public squares by way of a mobile shipping container kitchen.Second, “The Lummi Nation House of Tears Carvers Totem Pole Journey” is anIndigenous approach to building solidarity through public events in towns andcities centered around a totem pole temporarily installed at event sites. I argue that, at smalland momentary scales, collective urban design interventions are experimentsthat test various methods for the co-production of space and subjectivity. Particularlyin situations of disaster and disruption, engagement with the places ofeveryday life in experimental or novel activities creates moments that escapethe confines of expectation. These activities can instigate cultures ofsolidarity that include urban places and the more-than-human world in supportof urban resilience in the face of increasing social-environmental instability.
Open Access
The Holy Oak School of Art and Ecology: A Proposal for Arts-Based Environmental Education Programming
(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Best, Krysta; Stapleton, Sarah
The following is a proposal for arts-based environmental education programming in elementary schools, after-school programs, and day-camp programs, entitled the Holy School of Art and Ecology. Ecophenomenological, arts-based environmental education (AEE) takes a step in another direction and encourages learners to consider non-scientific or non-naturalistic elements of the natural world, like the aesthetic/affective as well as the ethical. Practitioners of AEE teach according to an educational philosophy that values and prioritizes embodied experience and aesthetic engagement, which enables learners to develop or continually develop their ecological selves.
Open Access
Settler Colonial Listening and the Silence of Wilderness in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area
(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Hilgren, Bailey; Wolf, Juan Eduardo
The Boundary Waters Canoe Area soundscape in northern Minnesota has a long and contested history but is most often characterized today as a pristine and distinctly silent wilderness. This thesis traces the construction and perpetuation of the Boundary Waters as a silent space by government agencies and conservationists, as well as the ways the notion of silence has and continues to limit Ojibwe sovereignty and, in related but distinct ways, undermine non-human animal agency. As extractive industries increasingly threaten the Boundary Waters, advocacy groups continue to appeal to the idea of the place as silent despite the similarity in logics underlying both extractivism and the myth of pristine wilderness. The project also considers broader historiographical and activist consequences associated with the idea of a silent Boundary Waters and utilizes public-facing writing formats to challenge iterative processes perpetuating settler colonial soundscape control.